I”m reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed – A sceptic makes peace with marriage.  She is the author of the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love where, following a devastating divorce, she takes a year off  and travels to Italy, crying over plate after plate of pasta, to India, seeking spiritual solace in an Ashram and Indonesia where she unwittingly falls in love with a Brazilian gem stone dealer.

 In Committed she explores marriage: examining her own terror of getting hitched again to Felipe the Brazlian; how it has evolved over the centuries and why so many fail spectacularly.  This is Gilbert grown up.  No more crying over bowls of pasta and navel gazing; it is a solid piece of research delving into her own psyche and the collective.

Donning her anthrolophogist hat, the book begins as a social essay charting her days spent with the Hmong in Viet Nam but although interesting you find yourself yearning for her to take off the serious Panama and put on her Aussie Outbacker with the corks dangling around the edges.  I fast forward, skip paragraphs and sometimes whole pages which reminds me of being back at school speed reading Molière.  As a researcher/essayist she gets the salient points across but it is the personal writing that Gilbert is so good at and thankfully she is soon out of the Hmong mud hut and back on dry land with Felipe writing from the  personal aspect which is far more entertaining and enlightening.  (If you have yet to discover Elizabeth Gilbert and you like this blog, go get yourself a copy…that’s me comparing myself to Elizabeth Gilbert ha ha).

So after travelling the world talking to many, many women about marriage Gilbert comes to the conclusion that the problem why so many marriages fail is one of expectation.  We, and by this I presume she means herself and those who have tried and failed to stay committed, (do I sound smug?  maybe a tad) believe that our other halves will not only help pay the bills, look after us when we are ill and put the bins out on Mondays but are also responsible for our happiness at every minute of the day.  I think she is onto something here, at least if I look around at the many around me who are divorced – not counting those who really are better off and should never have got involved with each other in the first place – I think many have blamed each other for their own failings, dissatisfactions and the downright difficulties of staying on an even keel and in happy bunny  mode through a life which is not always forgiving. 

As preparation for marriage to Felipe she lists a whole page of her own character failings and reads them out to him on the banks of the Mekong river.   (Note to reader your kitchen in Reading will do if you don’t happen to have the Mekong handy.)  At the end of a pretty honest, warts and all list which makes us want to be her best friend, she asks Felipe  in typical Gilbert style – which makes you take that wish back because she really can be too much at times -

 Do you still love me?

 To which he replies,

“I know all of this and I’ve been watching you for a very long time and I believe I can accept the whole parcel.” 

This is where you want to throw the book at her because if she doesn’t marry him I know a few thousand women who will.  That’s the thing about Gilbert and her writing, she can get a bit carried away with the me-ness and you find yourself batting for the other side on occasion.  Anyway, having wrung all the romance out of the holy matrimony of “marriage” through analysis, interviews and contemplation she starts to explore the bit that really cannot be explained away no matter what hat you are wearing at the time:  Love.  She writes of  her grandfather burying her grandmother’s ashes on the family farm and manages to convey, without once telling us, the years of love they shared and the ache in his heart since she has gone whilst  the tears gather in the rims of my reading glasses.

Of Felipe – whose faults she lists and lays out to dry in the sun for all the world to read: drinking too much wine and being hopeless with money – she writes: 

“I love this man.  I love him for countless ridiculous reasons.  I love his square, sturdy, Hobbit-like feet.  I love the way he always sings “La Vie en Rose” when he’s cooking dinner. (Needless to say I love that he cooks dinner).  I love how he speaks almost perfect English but still manages to invent marvellous words and has never quite mastered the exact wording or pacing of certain English-language idioms either.  “DONT COUNT YOUR EGGS WHILE THEY ARE STILL UP INSIDE THE CHICKEN’S ASS” is a terrific example.”

And she means that with every flaw in her being.

Life coincidences are strange.  Today in the mountains one of Sophie-G’s school pals spending the holidays with us asked for a Mars Bar for breakfast.  He’s charming, smart and kind but he’s not my son and so I let him eat it with only a wry comment from me.  Later, feeling guilty, I manage to get him to eat an apple.  But still life throws me back a question mark by leading me to Jamie Oliver’s speech a few hours later and I realise how remiss I was by not refusing and  cooking up some eggs instead.  Mine was a small task and I failed.  Jamie Oliver’s task is humongous.  He is attempting to convert all Mars Bar eaters in the USA to eat apples forever.  He’s brilliant.

The French call jogging  “le footing” and that is more of an exact terminology.  One foot in front of the other in a bouncing motion.  Anyway I don’t even get to start my “footing” until I arrive at the flat bit at the top of the hill in the woods.  For the moment I am power walking down the hill towards the river when  I pass the couple-without-children-with-the-four-cars going off to work.  I say “bonjour” politely although without the heart chakra engaged  because I harbour a fury towards their his and her minis, the four wheel drive and the porsche.  A few years back they were burgled and ALL her expensive underwear was stolen.  In fact the claim for expensive underwear outbid the other items taken during the robbery.  I know all this because we have the same architect and Georges is our friend.  Along with the fury at the conspicuous consumption is the curiosity as to how couples-without-children live.  A life where sensible, flesh coloured underwear for easy washing is banished, I presume.  I know they spend most evenings in their jacuzzi because I can see the steam.  (This is the second jacuzzi, the first had to be torn down because they failed to ask the Commune for planning permission as it was more than the size of a garden shed – of course it was this is a couple with four cars!).  After downing a jamboree of champagne – I swear I can hear the cork popping all the way up the hill to  my house – they have wild, rampant, loud sex in every room in the house, every night.

I am now at the river.  I soldier on up the snowy path listening to JB Glazinger.  This guy makes me laugh out loud.  He is a self-development guru and has to be the biggest bragger in the world.  He is a martial arts expert, has an MBA and PHD and is taking his pilot’s license which he somehow manages to remind us about in every podcast.  I giggle inbetween pants making my way up the wiggly footpath crunching in the snow as he tells me that I am a magnificient spiritual being living in a material world.  That’s me!  I finally reach the flat bit on the running trail and start my footing but my mind, which is inclined to always take the easy way out, says “Stop!  You’ll fall and break something!” This morning it sounds uncannily like Madre.  “It’s icy and then you’ll not be able to go to London this weekend.”  I take small steps gingerly avoiding the shiny patches then remember what I learned in Martin Brofman’s seminar about perception and reflection knowing full well that if I tell myself I am going to fall then I will.  I pick up the pace and sure enough the ground is firm and compact.  

Friday I leave for London. It is my nephew Myles’ sixteenth birthday celebration weekend so we have tickets for X Factor Live!  I know it’s lame but that’s the kind of family we are.  Aunty Sally, Godmother to Lexi, is even printing off Masks from the X factor website.  Madre has opted out as she is more of a Strictly woman and Mr. Jules is skiing with his Norwegian buddy. First, before the fun starts, Lexi has an interview and exam to get through.  We have been doing mock interviews over dinner and trying hard not to snigger when she articulates carefully and puts her posh accent on.  Mr. Jules told her to write “examining nine year olds is ridiculous” next to any questions she cannot answer.

I am squeezing in an afternoon of flat hunting with Casper, Edward and Jeremy who have some bijoux broom cupboards in fabulous locations to show me.  Heehee.  I am still amazed that people speak this way, I thought the Labour government had eradicated Hurray Henrys and any self-respecting ambitious London men spoke like Sir Alan Sugar.  Perhaps it is just property-speak.  My favourite is Stephen Lovelady, who speaks normally and whom I have been unwittingly calling Ladyfinger.  I think I have some sort of disease where I garble words or mishear them at times.  The girl on reception told me that they have a poll for the best alternative surname for Stephen and mine was topping the bill so far. I am a little ashamed to show my face at the uber-trendy Foxton’s on the King’s Road Friday at 4pm.

…Always be mindful of statistics:

Person A:  Which is the country with the lowest birth rate?

Person B:  Er Italy?

Person A:  Correct.  Very good.  So if you were a statistician you could probably find some correlation between eating pasta and infertility.

Boom Boom.  Enough said.

…I’m listening to Angus and Julia Stone on repeat.

…I’m reading This is Where I Leave You by Johnathan Tropper and the Polysyllabic Spree (still) and Journey to the River Sea at Alexia’s request because she wants to discuss(!) it with me.   

…I want to see Brothers.

I am dancing with a dozen women to Gerri Halliwell’s It’s Raining Men.  A disco ball throws green specks of light over us.  A bunch of middle aged women at a disco, only these are not any women.  Most of these women are in pain;  some are in the late stages of cancer.  As they dance about the room, throwing their arms in the air and girating trance-like to the music, my genetically engineered brand of irony and disdain is quiet.  All I see is the beauty and the dignity.

Françoise has been up there for at least an hour.  She is glowing with perspiration and joy.  Hard to believe this is the same Françoise who arrived angry and withdrawn, a shadow of this dancing diva. 

This is a seminar on the body mirroring system run by Martin Brofman.  Brofman believes that our physical symptoms are purely a reflexion of what is going on in our conscious mind.  He created this process of healing from his own experience thirty years ago when he developed a spinal tumour.  Given two months to live, he set out to experience as much of life as he could.  Along the way he discovered meditation and a zen master who told him that his cancer started in the mind and that is where he should go looking for a cure.  

We meditate. We heal each other.  We discover and understand the power of our own energy.  We laugh.  At night after dinner the music goes on and the unravelling begins.

Hugging is a big part of the healing process.  Hugging strangers took a while for this Brit to get used to.  I am a pioneer at the forefront of hugging strangers repression.  I’m just not genetically wired to melt into a stranger’s body and go for gold and so I soon realize that this is my sickness.  I may be one of the lucky healthy ones drawn to this experience out of curiosity and a willingness to learn more, but I’m lousy at opening up to strangers and I am here to breakdown the barriers that I create.

Along with the hugging fest, what I learn from this experience is that we are all born good. (Which is why the death penalty is not a solution and we are all somehow responsible for the crime).  That the power of the human spirit and the capacity to love is infinite; that we all create our own realities and that the answers to all our problems are to be found in our conscious mind.